I’ve had this book lying around the house for years and years (it was a freebie from the F&SF Book Club). So imagine my delight, a little while after I finally discovered the brilliance of Diana Wynne Jones, upon finding it in a pile of books. It’s a source of continuing misery to me that I didn’t read her books as a child, though I suspect I would have found them somewhat discomfiting and quite difficult reads at the time.

The novels of DWJ are a lot like Philip K Dick’s in their rough treatment of reality, but where in his books reality tends to fracture and break, in hers it slowly frays and dissolves, almost without your noticing. You think you’re standing on a nice cosy rug, but then find yourself falling through space wondering what the devil is going on. One colossal mistake which I’ve made from time to time is to put one of her books down and then pick it up again a few months later – something which always guarantees near instant befuddlement. This novel is putatively aimed at an adult readership, but is no great departure in style from her fiction for older teenage readers, such as the amazing Fire & Hemlock. That isn’t a bad thing. The story is intriguing and full of surprises, and if you don’t get absolutely all the answers on a plate at the end that is part of the fun. – SWT

This is quite a baffling book, at least without the assistance of the extras section at the end (or an excellent knowledge of the Greek myths and the related constellations). It’s an odd length for the author, which makes me wonder if this is a truncated book, or the first in a series, or just an idea for a longer book that didn’t pan out. Unless I missed something (I often do), the significance of the titular game is never made clear, other than as a kind of quiet revolt. All in all, it feels like the first third of one of DWJ’s novels for older teenagers. Intriguing though the story nevertheless is, it is almost trumped in that regard by the final pages of the book, which announce a forthcoming second sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle! – SWT

It’s often said that there are no new ideas left for science fiction writers to explore. It’s a problem raised by D.K. Latta in his story “Conversation in an English Pub”. The solution he offers is oddly brutal: travel back in time and murder pioneers like Wells and Shelley so that later aspiring authors can discover time travel and reanimated corpses for themselves.

Certainly the time travel concept is a well-trodden path for speculative writers, but that has not stopped the authors of the anthology Triangulation: End of Time from setting out along its muddied ruts in search of original conceits.

Beneath a slightly over-cooked cover (it resembles the inelegant design of a scientific textbook – from a distance you might mistake it for a exam revision guide aimed at students enrolled on a BSc in Time Travel), we find repeated attempts to wring some original speculative thrills from the well-squeezed notion of time travel.

A man conducts an affair with his wife when she was a younger, more attractive woman. There are extravagant, baffling worlds where jumping backwards and forwards in time has become as convenient as setting your iPod to shuffle, and which are in danger of collapsing under the weight of their own time-paradoxes. The contradictions inherent in the notion of time-travelling are dealt with lightly or exuberantly dismissed.

Not all the stories plump for time-travel. The stated theme is “End of Time”, so there are millenarian stories too, with apocalypses to suit all tastes, the most memorable being “America is Coming!”, in which the entire continent of North America breaks loose from its moorings and careers around the globe, destroying all in its path. Two Italian chancers attempt to hitch a ride on the errant landmass, only to discover that the US population have entered suspended animation for reasons that are never made clear.

If this is a metaphor for US Foreign Policy disasters (a blindly destructive nation populated by the somnolent), it’s a weak one, but perhaps I’m reading too much into this. What really makes the story stand out is the genuine sense of drama in the protagonists’ struggle to ground their boat on a moving shoreline. I’d be very surprised if author Dario Ciriello had not navigated some rough seas himself. What surprises me more is that I found the account genuinely gripping: I usually abhor tales of seafaring derring-do. For some reason the moment an author mentions jibs and yardarms, my eyelids grow heavy. Patrick O’Brian will never find a place on my bookshelf. Is that such a terrible shame?

Possibly.

Then again, nor can I ever normally bring myself to read novels by authors who are still alive, or abridged versions, or books with movie tie-in covers, or books with notes scrawled in the margins, although books with the names of previous owners written inside the front cover are good. Once I found an invitation to a cocktail party in a second-hand copy of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. The party had taken place in Brighton in 1965. I think that if I could go back in time, I would attend that cocktail party, and find out whose book that was, and what they thought of it. I wonder what they would say if I told them that in the future, the same Colin Wilson would pen a series of novels about giant spiders taking over the world. Perhaps that would make a good short story. – JG

Classic Hellblazer storytelling, as gloomy as in Jamie Delano’s day, as John Constantine has some of the worst times of his life. But like a lot of the current Hellblazer trade paperbacks, the colouring is murky and extremely unattractive. It isn’t necessarily the colourist’s fault – it’s the paper these trade paperbacks are printed on. It’s so difficult to make anything out that I’d prefer to read them in black and white. – SWT

This volume brings Mike Carey’s back-to-basics run on Hellblazer to a close. It’s been a good, exciting sequence, and this set of stories in particular is very rewarding for long-term readers of the title, bringing threads together from all previous eras – in particular those of Delano, Ennis and the under-appreciated Paul Jenkins (rather unfairly, the only major Hellblazer writer whose work has yet to be collected in even a single trade paperback), with quite a few nods to his origins in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. This book would have been a perfect end to the series, if the comic had to end. Happily it is still going, though, so I’m looking forward to catching up (weirdly, this was collected in trade paperback form only after the Denise Mina run which followed it, which meant the Denise Mina books, Empathy Is the Enemy and The Red Right Hand, have been sitting idly on my shelf these last few months). – SWT

Essential reading for anyone who’s been following Spider-Girl, as many of the mysteries set up in that title are cleared up in the two mini-series collected here. Unlike the other Spider-Girl Presents books – Juggernaut Jr, Avengers Next and Fantastic Five – which were M2 titles that ran in parallel to Spider-Girl, these are true spin-offs. The stories, to be honest, are nothing spectacular, and they lack the soap-opera elements that make Spider-Girl such an addictive read, but the various revelations about the origins of the Buzz and Darkdevil are quite eye-opening. – SWT